Furniture and furniture sets--partly called as kit furniture and having the characteristics described in the introduction--have been known and available from trade for a long time.
It is generally characteristic of the known approaches that for the load bearing and appropriately rigid connection of supports and panel elements, various hardware is always used, flushed into different single-purpose recesses, which are covered with additional plastic elements--frequently of the snap-on type after assembly--so that the recesses would not deteriorate the aesthetic appearance of the furniture. In order to increase the position and spacing options of panel elements and so as to modify the spacing between panels, the mostly vertical supports of various well known kit furniture approaches are designed with a pre-fabricated line of bores, and for the positioning and load-bearing support of panel elements, metal or plastic pins fitted into the appropriate bores of the line of bores at the required positions are applied. Related to the design of rectangular grid structure furniture and furniture sets assembled with joining panel elements located next to and above each other, numerous solutions have already become known. As examples, among others DE-OS 36 16 732 A1 and HU PS 182 592 can be mentioned.
It is a joint characteristic and a resulting joint disadvantage of the approaches described and mentioned above that the so assembled furniture and furniture sets characteristically retain their "kit furniture" nature. For example the pre-fabricated lines of bores remain visible on a prolonged basis, along with the supporting pins and the connection hardware or their covering. Such a furniture is less and less attractive nowadays to an increasing number of highly demanding customers. In the meantime, however, due to the high prices, very few customers may afford to buy tailor-made or small batch, so-called solid wood and period" furniture produced by the small-scale industry. Accordingly, a so far uncovered market gap is involved, represented by the fact that the supply of the furniture market is unable to fully satisfy the requirements of a highly demanding clientele, as a result of lacking technical solutions.
The purpose of the invention is the development of such a pre-fabricated framework and set of modules, which is identical with the well known assembled kit furniture solutions in that it is designed and set up using the modules and units of a pre-fabricated set of elements, and also in that primarily the final assembly takes place at the site identified by the customer, but regarding external appearance, quality and life cycle, this type of furniture is a proper match for tailor-made or small batch so-called solid wooden and/or period furniture produced by the small scale industry.